Geoff Munro, National Policy Manager at the Australian Drug Foundation, responds to a previous post by Dr Alex Wodak:
“Alex Wodak rightly points out that media campaigns do not in themselves change much behavior directly, so we cannot expect the binge drinking campaign to have a big effect.
It is hardly fair though, to characterize the campaign as backward. For a start, it tackles the drug that poses a real threat to the health and lives of young people: one teenager dies every week due to drinking and many more endure a range of permanent and temporary physical harms.
Second, the campaign tackles drinking customs in the context of problems that resonate with young people, aggression, violence, unsafe sex, road trauma. Not all government campaigns do that.
The tobacco control campaign that Alex Wodak celebrates for cutting down smoking makes liberal use of social marketing campaigns. Such campaigns help to set agendas, encourage “early adopters,” and prime the community for subsequent action. They establish a climate in which governments can take harder-edged actions, like increased taxation and tighter regulation, that impact directly on consumption.
Health workers should be making the case for a permanent advertising campaign on high risk drinking pace tobacco; a campaign that allows messages to be developed for different populations – teenagers, young adults, parents of children; parents of teenagers and middle-aged and older people.
The advice on drinking that was drafted for the National Health and Medical Research Council last year indicated the range of themes to be addressed. Low risk drinking applies to adults, but not to people aged under eighteen, or women pregnant or those hoping to become pregnant; best that they avoid drinking altogether. This will be quite a trick in Australia where drinking is hot wired into our collective social life and heavy drinking is sanctioned by custom.
One way of tackling it is a campaign that would congratulate people who enjoy alcohol without creating problems. Most people respond better to encouragement than criticism, so we might reinforce positive behaviour than highlight problems.
Call it “skilful drinking,” as opposed to “skinful”. Let’s reward people who enjoy themselves without spewing, without fighting, without drink driving, who create a time for their companions to remember fondly, rather than a night to forget, or one they can’t recall at all.”
Quite honestly, yet another campaign on the booze issue is a waste of the taxpayers’ dollar. What’s needed is for someone to develop a pill which temporarily disconnects that part of the brain which when combined with alcohol, testosterone, youth and sheer blind stupidity, produces the hoon and thuggish behaviour being demonstrated weekend after weekend, on Melbourne’s streets.
By having a pill to pacify the testosterone gland-already I can hear the civil libertarians’ shrieks of ‘holy outrage’. A pill to be taken before the little manikins-to call them men is an insult to our intelligence-goes out for the evening and programmed to wear off by about breakfast time. This way the darlings can drink themselves stupid (which they already do) without wanting to get into fights. Also this allows the rest of the community to drink in comfort and not be forced to adjust their drinking hours to fit in with fifteen to twenty-five year old feral animals.
I fail to see the benefit of rewarding drinkers who don’t create problems. 1) By twenty-six the testosterone seems to calm down a lot. 2) It is merely another form of dictatorship and or censorship. How do you round up the city of four million people to see who can drink without harming others? It is less difficult to arrest the ferals as they are legless anyway. Also; how can the use of logic be achieved when hormones are rampaging wildly and being fueled by alcohol?
Of course there would be a corresponding drop in traffic accidents, and an even greater decline in the amount of smoking. I wish someone would understand there is a limit to the amount of things the taxpayer has to pay for in order to cocoon our children. Given the exploding population being inflicted on our once liveable city. The problem will continue to multiply. We will end up like Montreal (I think it’s Montreal, perhaps Quebec) Where the city fathers have built a huge chain-link fence right down the centre of the main thoroughfare. On one side live the poverty stricken, and on the other side you have the enormously rich. In our case it would be the sane adults on one side, and the ferals living on the other side. The ones which survive for five years will automatically be eligible to cross the fence.
Yes, I think yet another campaign is a retrograde step. Unless someone does something PDQ the city will become a total bloodbath.